Meet Maurice Strong: Globalist, Oiligarch, “Environmentalist”

No, it is not difficult to see why globalists love arch-globalist Maurice Strong. But how did this man, a dirt poor high school dropout from Oak Lake, Manitoba, rise to become an international wheeler-dealer who is responsible for shaping our modern day globalist institutions? The story is as unlikely as it is instructive, and it leads us from the heart of the oil patch to the formation of the IPCC.

“Disgraced kleptocrat Maurice Strong died late last year at the age of 86. He was shunned from polite society and forced into a life of exile in Beijing after his decades of business intrigues, crimes against humanity, and environmental destruction unraveled. His savagery culminated with an attempt to profit off of the death of starving Iraqi children. His funeral was a quiet affair, attended only by those few family members who could not find it in their heart to shun him completely. Former friends and business associates like Paul Martin, James Wolfensohn, Kofi Annan, Conrad Black, and Al Gore all avoided calls for comments on their disgraced friend’s passing.”

…is how Maurice Strong’s legacy would have been remembered in any reasonable world. Instead we get this:

“On Wednesday, hundreds will gather across from Parliament Hill for an extraordinary commemoration. The Governor General, the Prime Minister, the Minister of the Environment, the former president of the World Bank – among other dignitaries, in and out of office – will pay homage to one of the great Canadians of his generation. They will celebrate the life of Maurice Frederick Strong, who died on November 27. His passing brought the obligatory obituaries and personal tributes. But in a country that often hides its light under a barn, Maurice Strong – and the feverish, consequential life he led at home and abroad – should not go uncelebrated.”

And the accolades just keep pouring in.

From Canadian PM Justin Trudeau: “Maurice Strong was a pioneer of sustainable development who left our country and our world a better place.”

In fact, a whole gaggle of globalists showed up to pay tribute to the memory of Strong earlier this week in Ottawa, from former World Bank president James Wolfensohn to under-secretary general of the UN Achim Steiner to Martin Lees, the former secretary-general of the Club of Rome. Written condolences poured in from other prominent globalists including Mikhail Gorbachev, Gro Harlem Bruntland and Kofi Annan.

So why exactly was Maurice Strong so beloved by the globalist jet set?

INTERVIEWER: “Maurice Strong doesn’t have any ambition for the United Nations to become the world’s government?”

STRONG: “No, and it’s not necessary, it’s not feasible, and certainly we are a long way from any such thing. But we do need–if we are going to have a more peaceful world, a more secure world–we need a more effective system of cooperation, which is what I call ‘system of governance.’ And the United Nations, with all its difficulties, is the best game in town.”

President of Power Corp. President of the Canadian International Development Agency. Chair of Petro Canada. Chair of Ontario Hydro. Head of the United Nations Environmental Program. Founding member of the World Economic Forum at Davos. Father of the IPCC. Committed globalist.

No, it is not difficult to see why globalists love arch-globalist Maurice Strong. But how did this man, a dirt poor high school dropout from Oak Lake, Manitoba, rise to become an international wheeler-dealer who is responsible for shaping our modern day globalist institutions? The story is as unlikely as it is instructive, and it leads us from the heart of the oil patch to the formation of the IPCC.

Given Strong’s remarkable ascent through the ranks of political power to become a globalist kingpin, it won’t be surprising to hear that he had political connections in his family. But it may be surprising to hear where those connections were placed. His aunt, Anna Louise Strong, was a committed communist who befriended Lenin and Trotsky (who asked her to teach him English) before she ultimately settled in China, where she was on familiar terms with Mao Zedong. She became close with Zhou Enlai, who wept openly when she was buried with full honors in Beijing’s Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery.

Unfortunately for humanity, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree with young Maurice. Born in rural Manitoba in 1929 and suffering through the worst of the Great Depression, Maurice Strong drops out of school at age 14 to look for work. He works his way around as a deck hand on ships and then, at age 16, as a fur buyer for the Hudson’s Bay Company in Canada’s North. There he meets “Wild” Bill Richardson, whose wife, Mary McColl, hails from the family behind McColl-Frontenac, one of Canada’s largest petroleum companies.

“Strong first met with a leading UN official in 1947 who arranged for him to have a temporary low-level appointment, to serve as a junior security officer at the UN headquarters in Lake Success, New York. He soon returned to Canada, and with the support of Lester B. Pearson, directed the founding of the Canadian International Development Agency in 1968.”

As far as massive narrative gaps and cryptic cover-ups of detail go, that paragraph is a masterpiece. The truth is even weirder. That “UN official” referred to by Wiki? That was none other than the Treasurer of the UN himself, Noah Monod. In fact, Monod doesn’t just get him a job, he gives him a place to live; the two room together during Strong’s time in the Big Apple. But most importantly, Monod gives him an introduction to the man who more than any other will be behind his meteoric rise to international superstardom: David Rockefeller.

Maurice Strong liked to relate the story that he had been confrontational with Rockefeller at the start. According to Strong, some of his first words to David were “I’m deeply prejudiced against you and all your family stands for.” Oddly, David doesn’t remember the meeting that way, saying instead that the two had “a strong working relationship.”

Either way, from that moment on Strong was a made man. And from that moment on, wherever Strong went Rockefeller and his associates were there somewhere in the background.

It was a Standard Oil veteran, Jack Gallagher, who gave Strong his big break in the Alberta oil patch when he quit his UN security job to return to Canada. Gallagher had been hired to create a new oil and gas exploration company by Henrie Brunie, a close friend of Rockefeller associate John J. McCloy. Strong signed on as Gallagher’s assistant.

When Maurice Strong suddenly decided to quit his job, sell his house, and travel to Africa, he found a job with Rockefeller’s CalTex in Nairobi.

When he quit that job in 1954 and started his own company back in Canada, he hired Brunie to manage it and appointed two Standard Oil of New Jersey reps to its board. By this point he was in his late 20s and already a multi-millionaire.

After considerable networking with Canada’s political elite, Strong was appointed head of Power Corporation, the baby of the powerful “Canadian Rockefellers,” the Desmarais family. Power Corp is a political kingmaker in Canadian politics and under Strong’s stewardship it continued to function in that role. One of his appointees: a fresh-faced Harvard MBA named James Wolfensohn, future president of the World Bank. Another hand pick: Paul Martin, future CEO of Canada Steamship Lines and Prime Minister of Canada.

Strong left Power Corp to head up Canada’s External Aid program. He oversaw the creation of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) As journalist Elaine Dewar, who interviewed Strong for her groundbreaking book “Cloak of Green,” explains:

“IDRC had a clause in its enabling legislation allowing it to give money directly to individuals as well as to governments and private organizations. It was set up as a corporation, reporting to Parliament through the minister of external affairs. Its board of governors was designed to include private and even foreign persons.[…]Since IDRC was not created as an agent of the Crown (as CIDA is) , it was able to receive charitable donations from corporations and individuals as well as government funds.”

Those “corporations and individuals” generously “donating” their money to IDRC naturally included Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank and the Rockefeller Foundation itself. Strong admitted to Dewar that the IDRC was able to peddle political influence in the third world under its quasi-governmental guise.

His quasi-business/quasi-governmental/quasi-“philantrhopic” career reached a new level in 1969, however. That’s when the Swedish ambassador to the UN called Strong up to see if he wanted to head the forthcoming United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, due to take place in 1972. He got the call not out of any supposed love for the environment, but because even by that time Strong was renowned as a human Rolodex of political, business and financial connections across the developed and developing world.

The 1972 Stockholm summit is still hailed as a landmark moment in the history of the modern environmental movement, leading not only to the first governmentally-administered environmental action plans in Europe but the creation of an entirely new UN bureaucracy: the United Nations Environment Program. UNEP’s founding director: Maurice Strong. As Dewar explains:

“Like so many of the organizations Strong has made, this one too had multiple uses. In 1974, UNEP rose out of the undeveloped soil of Nairobi, Kenya, Strong’s old stomping ground. Placing UNEP in Africa was explained as a sop to the developing countries, who had been suspicious of Western intentions. But it was also useful for the big powers to have another international organization in Nairobi. After the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Nairobi became the key spy capital of Africa.”

The Yom Kippur War and resulting OPEC oil embargo (magically foretold by the Bilderberg Conference in Sweden earlier that year and arranged by David Rockefeller’s agent, Henry Kissinger) had another spin-off effect that ended up benefiting Strong. The embargo hit eastern Canada hard, prompting Prime Minister Trudeau to create a publicly-run national oil company. The result: Petro-Canada was born in 1975 and Trudeau naturally appointed Strong, by now the single most powerful member of the global(ist) environmental movement, as its first president.

David Rockefeller was there with Strong in Colorado in 1987 for the “Fourth World Wilderness Congress,” a meeting of world-historical importance that almost no one had even heard of. Attended by the likes of Rockefeller, Strong, James Baker and Edmund de Rothschild himself, the conference ultimately revolved around the question of financing for the burgeoning environmental movement that Strong had shaped from the ground up through his work at the United Nations Environment Program.

It was at that conference (recordings of which are available online thanks to whistleblower George Hunt) that Rothschild called for a World Conservation Bank, which he envisioned as the funding mechanism for a “second Marshall Plan” that would be used for third world “debt relief” and that favourite globalist dog whistle “sustainable development.”

Rothschild’s dream came true when Strong presided over another high-level UN environment summit: the 1992 Rio “Earth Summit.” Although perhaps best known as the conference that birthed Agenda 21, much less well known is that it was the Earth Summit that allowed the World Conservation Bank to become a reality.

Started on the eve of the Rio Earth Summit as a $1 billion World Bank pilot program, the bank, now known as the “Global Environment Facility” (GEF) is the largest public funder of global environmental projects, having made over $14.5 billion in grants and cofinanced a further $75.4 billion. The bank is the financial mechanism for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the organizing convention directing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

With Agenda 21 under his belt, Rothschild’s GEF dream bank in the can and the IPCC already twinkling in his eye, Strong’s remarkable career showed no signs of stopping. After wrapping up the Rio Summit he took on a series of appointments so bewildering it almost defies credulity. From his official website comes the following list:

“After the Earth Summit, Strong continued to take a leading role in implementing the results of Rio through establishment of the Earth Council, the Earth Charter movement, his Chairmanship of the World Resources Institute, Membership on the Board of the International Institute for Sustainable Development, the Stockholm Environment Institute, the African-American Institute, the Institute of Ecology in Indonesia, the Beijer Institute of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and others. Strong was a longtime Foundation Director of the World Economic Forum, a Senior Advisor to the President of the World Bank, a Member of the International Advisory of Toyota Motor Corporation, the Advisory Council for the Center for International Development of Harvard University, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, the World Conservation Union (IUCN), the World Wildlife Fund, Resources for the Future, and the Eisenhower Fellowships.”

There is no doubt that Strong led a charmed life. And given the persistent presence of Rockefeller interests in that life from his earliest years, there is no doubt why doors seemed to open for him wherever in the world he went.

But still, one has to ask how and why a high school dropout who made it big in the oil patch thanks to his big oil connections would go on to become the single most important figure in the international environmental movement. Was he genuinely interested in protecting the environment?

Consider Strong’s acquisition of the Arizona Colorado Land & Cattle Company from Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi in 1978. As part of that acquisition, Strong gained control over a ranch in the San Luis Valley in Colorado called the Baca Grande. As Henry Lamb explains in a 1997 article:

The ranch, called Baca, sat on the continent’s largest fresh water aquifer. Strong intended to pipe the water to the desert southwest, but environmental organizations protested and the plan was abandoned. Strong ended up with a $1.2 million settlement from the water company, an annual grant of $100,000 from Laurance Rockefeller, and still retained the rights to the water.

No, Strong’s interest in the site had nothing to do with preserving the pristine environment of the San Luis Valley. His interest was altogether stranger. As Quadrant Online notes:

Maurice Strong had been told by a mystic that:

The Baca would become the centre for a new planetary order which would evolve from the economic collapse and environmental catastrophes that would sweep the globe in the years to come.

As a result of these revelations Strong created the Manitou Foundation, a New Age institution located at the Baca ranch — above the sacred waters that Strong had been denied permission to pump out. This hocus-pocus continued with the foundation of The Conservation Fund (with financial help of Laurance Rockefeller) to study the mystical properties of the Manitou Mountain. At the Baca ranch there is a circular temple devoted to the world’s mystical and religious movements.

Indeed, Strong’s missionary zeal for spreading his environmental message of doom and destruction for so many decades can be more easily explained as a quasi-religious zeal for preparing the way for the “New World Order” that this environmental doom supposedly foretells.

Further insight into Strong’s own mystic, New Age beliefs are found in what he considered to be his most important achievement: the creation of the Earth Charter. The Earth Charter was an outgrowth of Strong’s Earth Council Institute which he founded in 1992 with the help of Mikhail Gorbachev, David Rockefeller (of course), Al Gore, Shimon Peres, and a bevvy of Strong’s globalist friends.

Strong’s own website has described the Earth Charter as “a widely recognized, global consensus statement on ethics and values for a sustainable future,” but Strong himself has framed the document in religious terms, saying he hopes it will be treated like a new Ten Commandments.

So what does the Earth Charter say? Other than the predictable mealy-mouthed platitudes one would expect about “social and economic justice” and other political buzzwords, the document ends up as a love letter to world government:

“In order to build a sustainable global community, the nations of the world must renew their commitment to the United Nations, fulfill their obligations under existing international agreements, and support the implementation of Earth Charter principles with an international legally binding instrument on environment and development.”

The Earth Charter itself rests in the “Ark of Hope,” a literal ark that was constructed specifically to house the original document in an obvious reference to the ark of the covenant. The ark was unveiled on September 9, 2001 and then carried 350 miles to the United Nations in the wake of 9/11. The Earth Charter Commission member who presided over the unveiling just happened to be none other than Steven C. Rockefeller.

While this quasi-religious quest for global government is always wrapped in feelgood language about strengthening communities and preserving the planet, the underlying reality is about a much more Machiavellian agenda. As Dewar notes of the Rio Summit in “Cloak of Green”:

“Advertised as the World’s Greatest Summit, Rio was publicly described as a global negotiation to reconcile the need for environmental protection with the need for economic growth. The cognoscenti understood that there were other, deeper goals. These involved the shift of national regulatory powers to vast regional authorities; the opening of all remaining closed national economies to multinational interests; the strengthening of decision making structures far above and far below the grasp of newly minted national democracies; and, above all, the integration of the Soviet and Chinese empires into the global market system. There was no name for this very grand agenda that I had heard anyone use, so later I named it myself–the Global Governance Agenda.”

Strong himself gave some insight into what this agenda actually entailed for the average man or woman in a 1972 BBC interview prior to the start of the Stockholm summit. Discussing the “overpopulation problem” then en vogue as the environmental cause du jour, Strong admitted to his musings on the potential for reproductive licenses:

“Licenses to have babies incidentally is something that I got in trouble for some years ago for suggesting even in Canada that this might be necessary at some point, at least some restriction on the right to have a child. I’m not proposing this, I was simply predicting this as one of the possible courses that society would have to seriously consider should we get ourselves into this kind of situation.”

That Strong was so successful in promoting his “global governance” agenda for so many decades is a testament not to his own visionary leadership, as so many globalists profess, but to the incredible resources of the Rockefellers and Rothschilds and others who are funding this agenda into existence and pushing it along at every step.

It is some measure of good fortune, then, that Strong’s decades of deceit finally came to an end (more or less) in 2005, when, as Quadrant Online notes, he was finally caught “with his hand in the till”:

“Investigations into the UN’s Oil-for-Food-Program found that Strong had endorsed a cheque for $988,885 made out to M. Strong — issued by a Jordanian bank. The man who gave the cheque, South Korean business man Tongsun Park was convicted in 2006 in a US Federal court of conspiring to bribe UN officials. Strong resigned and fled to Canada and thence to China where he has been living ever since.”

Although still making appearances at various events around the world, Strong led a much more low key existence for the past decade, likely slowed by the ravages of advancing age. But now that he has finally passed away, we are left to be subjected to yet more nauseatingly lavish praise for this man and the many globalist institutions that comprise his legacy.

No, it is not difficult to understand why Maurice Strong was so beloved of the globalist jet set. Just don’t expect any of the members of that jet set to tell you this story in any detail.

About the Author:

James Corbett has been living and working in Japan since 2004. He started The Corbett Report website in 2007 as an outlet for independent critical analysis of politics, society, history, and economics. Since then he has written, recorded and edited over 1000 hours of audio and video media for the website, including a weekly podcast and several regular online video series. He produces video reports for GRTV, and BoilingFrogsPost.com. He is also an editorial writer for The International Forecaster, the weekly e-newsletter created by the late Bob Chapman.

His work has been carried online by a wide variety of websites and his videos have garnered over 22,000,000 views on YouTube alone. His satirical piece on the discrepancies in the official account of September 11th, “9/11: A Conspiracy Theory” was posted to the web on September 11, 2011 and has so far been viewed over 2 million times.

For more information about Corbett and his background, please listen to Episode 163 of The Corbett Report podcast, Meet James Corbett: Episode 163 – Meet James Corbett